What appears to be a teeny tiny alien world has just been found orbiting the Solar System's closest stellar neighbor.
The exoplanet candidate, named Proxima d, orbits a star named Proxima Centauri: a small, dim red dwarf star just 4.2 light-years from the Sun.Amazingly, the exoplanet is just a quarter of the mass of Earth. That makes it one of the smallest exoplanets ever detected, and the smallest detected by observing the exoplanet's gravitational effect on its star.
The discovery also marks the third exoplanet found orbiting Proxima Centauri, and although the newly discovered world would not be habitable, its detection suggests that there's a whole wealth of exoplanets out there just outside the reach of our current capabilities. "The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbor seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration,"To date, nearly 5,000 exoplanets have been discovered and confirmed, and we have detections of thousands more candidate exoplanets.
We have two main ways for searching for these exoplanets. The most widely used technique is the transit method, in which a telescope observes stars for long periods of time to detect the faint, regular dips in brightness that signal an orbiting planet passing between us and the star.The other most commonly used method is known as the radial velocity method. When two bodies, such as a star and a planet, are gravitationally bound, one doesn't orbit the other.
Both of these methods are much better at detecting bigger exoplanets. A bigger exoplanet will block more light from the star, or produce a more pronounced stellar wobble.
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